OUT AUGUST 7TH, 2015
ALL ORDERS FOR THE DIGIPACK CD EDITION OF ABYSS OF LONGING THROATS WILL SHIP ON 8/3/15 IN ADVANCE OF RELEASE DATE. THE DIGITAL ALBUM WILL BE RELEASED ON 8/7.
VINYL EDITION OF ABYSS OF LONGING THROATS COMING IN LATE 2015.

Though Gnaw Their Tongues has hardly been quiet in the interim, what with recent collaborations with Alkerdeel, the release of the Collected Atrocities collection and recent high-profile performances in the US at Maryland Deathfest XIII and Apex VI, it's been a good three years since the last full-length album from this Dutch nightmare machine. But with new album Abyss Of Longing Throats, Gnaw Their Tongues has returned in full ravenous glory, offering another hellish cacophony of mangled industrial black metal, lurching deformed heaviness, twisted electronic carnage and bombastic orchestral power that sounds like no one else.

From the frenzied black swarms that sweep across the doom-laden death industrial of opener "Lick The Poison From The Cave Walls" that eventually resolves into a glacial haze of bleary, blasted bliss, to the hallucinatory black metal of "Through Flesh" that fuses staccato violins, terrifying choral singing and grueling mechanical doom to one of the most emotionally stirring sequences yet heard in the band's catalog, Abyss continues to chart the evolution of Gnaw Their Tongues' sound. There's plenty of the grueling industrialized heaviness and violent orchestral sounds the band is known for, but this new material also expands upon the filthy blackened doom at the heart of Gnaw Their Tongues' music with those moments of striking melodic power, moments where all the horror surging through these songs suddenly transforms into something hauntingly elegiac. Brief passages of tragic beauty, scattered throughout an abyss roiling with relentless programmed blastbeats, somber chamber strings hovering mournfully amid tortured shrieks, harsh clanking percussion and blasts of raging orchestral chaos, all writhing together into another exhilarating descent into total demonic delirium from this monstrous outfit.

OUT AUGUST 21ST, 2015
ALL ORDERS FOR THE GATEFOLD CD EDITION OF IRON SCORN WILL SHIP ON 8/14/15 IN ADVANCE OF RELEASE DATE.

When it comes to slavering, skull-crushing heaviness and flesh-destroying death metal barbarism, nothing I've heard this year has fucked me up as much as the debut album from Legion Of Andromeda. Diabolical in its minimalist approach, the new album from Tokyo-based duo Legion Of Andromeda wormed its way deep into my brain upon first hearing it (thanks to a recommendation from fellow Maryland label Unholy Anarchy), unleashing a grinding nightmare of violent, industrial doomdeath rooted in a barbaric simplicity, moving in endlessly cyclical percussive patterns. It makes perfect sense that the band enlisted none other than Steve Albini to record this album, as the monolithic percussive pummel of Big Black is an admitted influence on Legion's sound. Iron Scorn was first released on vinyl by the aforementioned Unholy Anarchy, with At War With False Noise handling the European release, and is now being followed up with a CD release by Crucial Blast to further the blast radius of this immense debut.

Iron Scorn has a strange effect upon certain listeners, myself included. As opener "Transuranic Ejaculation" bellows across the first moments of Scorn, the band's combination of primitive bone-crushing riffage and minimal, mechanical tempo seems overly simplistic, even monotonous. Each song centers around little more than a pair of interchanging riffs that circle endlessly over an unfluctuating mid-paced drumbeat that rarely deviates from a simple combination of metronomic crash cymbal and rumbling double bass. Keep listening, though, and Legion Of Andromeda's seemingly atavistic heaviness begins to reveal a perversely hypnotic quality, the brutal repetition and savage cyclical flow of these seven tracks turning into surprisngly infectious blasts of ravenous, concussive doomdeath. The riffs shift between droning heavioisty and abrasive dissonance, without ever diminishing the sheer skull-flattening density; sure, the pummeling violence of tracks like "Transuranic Ejaculation" and "Fist Of Hammurabi" is undeniably monotonous, but that monotony is both deliberate and crucial to the band's sadistic, sickening assault, each song scultped into an interlocking flesh-rendning horror oif gnashing steel teeth and machine-driven hypnosis and rabid violence, an endless mecha-death trance that burrows like some slavering cyborg worm through your rippling flesh. And it's topped off with repulsively bestial vocals that frequently devolve into psychotic gibberish or rabid snarling vocalizations, as if you're hearing the singer devolve, Altered States-style, right before your eyes. Those fucked-up vocals bring an added unhinged vibe to this rigid, skull-flattened dronedeath assault. Legion Of Andromeda have hacked out a uniquely vicious sound, and shares as much disgusting DNA with the clanking ugliness of early Swans and the grinding industrial metal of bands like Dead World, Skin Chamber and Streetcleaner-era Godflesh as it does with the putrescent doom/death of Autopsy, Cianide and Asphyx, brilliantly fusing the devastating down-tuned chug of the latter to the repetitive, belt-driven clangor of the former. Each monstrous track churns through the black cosmos like a mechanical warbeast comprised of gnashing teeth and interlocking gears, terrifying and trance-inducing, with equal nods to the most depraved strains of industrial metal and the most primitive depths of black/death violence.

"...a prime example of this twisted genius at work - while Collected Atrocities as a whole never relents in pushing the boundaries of what the dark ambient genre can achieve when placed within the creative hands of one as devilishly talented and morbidly creative as Mories. This one is a perfectly uneasy listen. 5/5" - RUE MORGUE MAGAZINE

"...some of the most harrowing and tension filled sounds this side of hell's blackest pit. Deep, orchestral cues of ambiance clash with propulsive sound frequencies, frenzied screaming and some of the bleakest samples put to record, all in order to instill the uneasiest of feelings within the hearts and minds of all who dare listen." - EXAMINER.COM

For nearly a decade, Dutch avant-black/doom entity, GNAW THEIR TONGUES -- named after a particularly evocative passage from the Book Of Revelation -- has been infecting the underground with a uniquely disturbing brand of chaotic heaviness. Fusing together malevolent, rumbling doom with rabid, noise-damaged aggression and blasts of fearsome orchestral power and industrial pandemonium, and draping these lurching, hellish dirges in an oppressive atmosphere thick with horror and despair, the intensely nightmarish music of GNAW THEIR TONGUES defies easy categorization. The sum of all GTT’s construction and execution is the work of sole architect and madman, Mories, also known for other destructive output with Cloak of Altering, Pyriphlegethon, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating, Mors Sonat, Pompidou, Dimlit Hate Cellar and others.

Before the release of the band's Crucial Blast debut, An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, in 2007, GNAW THEIR TONGUES crawled into the black metal/industrial underground via a number of ultra-limited EPs which quickly went out of print, and are now sought after by fans of the band's abject blackened horror. Collected Atrocities 2005-2008 is a new double CD anthology that gathers together essential, out-of-print early recordings from the band that span the first three years of GNAW THEIR TONGUES's existence, compiling the Preferring Human Skin Over Animal Fur, Horse Drawn Hearse and For All Slaves... A Song Of False Hope EPs, the material from the Static Hymnal compilation, and other rarities from the bowels of the GTT archive.

We also have the Gnaw Their Tongues Atrocities shirt design, released in tandem with the Collected Atrocities 2005-2008 anthology from Gnaw Their Tongues, featuring artwork from the album on the front and a two-color print of the Gnaw Their Tongues logo on the back, printed on a black Gildan garment. ALL ORDERS FOR THE ATROCITIES SHIRT WILL SHIP AFTER 2.10.15

CRUCIAL BLAST WEBSTORE: NEW ARRIVALS FOR MONDAY, MARCH 9TH 2015

Greetings, nightrunners...

Welcome to the latest list of fringe metal abominations, anti-human art and outré listening experiences that comprise the Crucial Blast new arrivals for this week. And there is a lot for you to check out - over 130 new releases, restocks and hard-to-find out of print titles that I've assembled from across the globe. A bunch of noteworthy new albums from heavyweights like Leviathan, Old Man Gloom and even our own Gnaw Their Tongues are in here, lots of recent horror soundtrack reissues including a few that I've personally been looking forward to for quite some time, and some great stuff from favorite labels like Malignant, Annihilvs, and Cold Spring.

The featured release is the latest from Boston-area outfit Sewer Goddess, whose latest Painlust has been repeatedly finding its way to the C-Blast office soundsystem over the past week. There were a bunch of amazing new metal albums that came out this week (Leviathan, Sumac, Sannhet) that all floored me in one form or another, but there's something about Painlust that made it the perfect soundtrack to the past few weeks for me here. It features a similar sound as the band's previous releases, but here it's pared down by band leader Kristin Rose to a leaner, more focused sonic attack, maintaining that filthy blackened industrial vibe but adding a heavier amount of Godfleshian heaviness than ever before. While there's definitely a major Godflesh (and Swans) influence, Rose and crew merge that pummeling industrial metal with a thick, cloying atmosphere of rust and rot that transforms this into their own distinct brand of hellish machinefucked heaviosity. For anyone who shares my taste in malevolent industrial metal, this one is highly recommended...

Also on this week's update is the new Collected Atrocities 2005-2008 2xCD from Gnaw Their Tongues that came out recently from Crucial Blast. It's a collection of rare, out-of-print and unreleased material that was produced by this notorious Dutch black industrial band within the first few years of it's existence. Predating the Epiphanic album, these early works are just as depraved and disgustingly caustic as that album, delivering that unique monstrous hybrid of black metal, death industrial, doom, and noise that Gnaw Their Tongues has become renowned for over the past decade. Pick this up and see where the filth first started to flow; a perfect primer to lead up to their upcoming performances in the USA later this year. Along with the 2xCD and digital album, we also released a new shirt design that's available individually or bundled with the album.

Lots of black metal of the left-field/progressive persuasion this week, including new releases and new vinyl editions of albums from Alraune, Mysticum, Xothist, Vorde, and Imperial Triumphant; Bethlehem's latest mutant gloomfest Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, the crazily-packaged In Death 7" from noisy black metallers Ancestors, and the long-awaited new mini-album from the singular post-punk influenced black metal band Ghost Kommando,
Abraxas Rising; brutal blackened punk barbarism from Damonenblut and a vinyl version of Hail Spirit Noir's blackprog debut Pneuma, recent split 7"s from Krieg / Ramlord and Vermapyre / Vehrmoedr, the trippy post-punk/black metal/hardcore lunacy of Leather Chalice's Luna, and the deformed sewer deliriums of De Silence Et D'Ombre's Vol. IV - Worship The Hideous.

Fans of industrial heaviness will want to check out the new 2xLP reissue of the debut release from Author & Punisher, crushing new discs from Auditor and Khost, a massive triple-disc retrospective of Norwegian industrial metallers Red Harvest, restocks of the latest from pioneers Godflesh AND a killer new compilation called Fathers Of Our Flesh that features the likes of Gnaw, Nadja, Author & Punisher, Eagle Twin, Wormed and many more each doing their own unique interpretations of classic Godflesh tracks; and a new cassette version of Pig Heart Transplant's latest album For Mass Consumption...

On the horror soundtrack front, C-Blast continues to expand it's selection with new and recent releases of the reissue of the score for Argento's Phenomena from Italian spook-prog masters Goblin, Simon Boswell's ornate score to the brutal Soavi slasher Stage Fright, the new One Way Static release of Phillip Glass's haunting Candyman score (on vinyl AND cassette), and reissues of John Cameron's wild and witchy Psychomania score and the Dawn Of The Dead Unreleased Music compilation, both from Trunk; as well as recent reissues of the John Carpenter scores for Prince Of Darkness and Halloween III: season Of The Witch, and most importantly, the new solo album from John Carpenter Lost Themes, a killer full-length of proggy, sinister synthesizer music from the master of cinematic tension and dread. There's also a new repress of Richard Band's Re-Animator OST, and a CD that features the entire soundtrack to the 1968 release of Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages, combining William S. Burrough's narrative with a cool experimental jazz score.

A bunch of extreme electronics and noise releases from Bastard Noise (including their long-delayed collaboration with Kalmex And The Riffmerchants that is probably the weirdest fucking release on this list), Maurizio Bianchi's Amentest 7", the out-of-print Aube CD Howling Obsession [Revised], the punishing HNW of Edwige's Virgin Capricorn LP, a couple of twisted power electronics/industrial tapes on Tested Souls from X Narrative and Exploring Therapeutic Encounter, and a pair of brutal noise/cut-up 7"s from John Wiese, one of 'em a collab with former Fear Of God member Dave Phillips; nerve-shredding power electronics from Streetmeat, Baculum and False Flag, and a flesh-rending 7" of extreme synthesizer violence from Japan's Zaiden.

Things get extremely ugly with recent vinyl editions of Coffinworm's latest and a new Lp from UK sludge/noise rock heathens Art Of Burning Water; a restock of Fistula's recent filth-feast Vermin Prolificus, and the debut album from pessimistic tarpit thugs Fortress, Unto The Nothing; we've got all of the recent releases from back-in-action noise rock legends Hammerhead, and those currently out-of-print 2xLP reissues of the classic early Melvins albums Eggnog / Lice All and Ozma / Bullhead - quantities are very limited. Restocks of Mournful Congregation's Concrescence Of The Sophia and the slo-mo sludge rock bliss of the Godstopper/Tendril split; newly remastered 2xLP reissues of Isis's Oceanic and Panopticon; more grueling noise rock via Rectal Hygienics' Ultimate Purity, and Moutheater's Passing Key. And more soul-flattening doom from Sea Witch, Pallbearer, Sea Of Bones, and Witch Mountain.

And so much more, from the vinyl release of the blistering Wolves Of Heaven / Nyodene-D split, the latest double album of jazz-damaged Godfleshian heaviness from Combat Astronomy, and a new album from New York metallic hardcore band Darkside NYC that showcases their vicious mashup of streetwise punk, Celtic Frost-style riffage and extreme noise; to the industrial-tinged doom-jazz of Laube, and the hallucinatory French weirdness of Echancrure's Paysage, Octobre and reissues of French black metal narco-maniacs Diapsiquir; gobs of insane noisecore from Sissy Spacek and Surplus Killing; crazed death metal weirdness from Order From Chaos, Lithotome, and Dimentianon; violent hardcore and power-violence from Chest Pain, Column Of Heaven, Iron Lung, Man Is The Bastard, No Faith, Suppression, Nuklear Blast Suntan, and Una Bestia Incontrolable; mutant grindcore from the likes of Sete Star Sept, Plutocracy, Pryapisme, and the new Psudoku album Planetarisk Sudoku. Hard-to-find releases from death industrial and infernal ambient outfits Elhaz, Hadit and Valefor released on the defunct German label Memento Mori, and lots of great dark ambience and ritualistic resonances from Draugurinn, Solo Andata, Caulbearer and Sky Burial, Sigma Octantis, Emme Ya and Nuit, and Slavic synth primitavists Sorfeum. And plenty of pitch-black electronic / industrial sounds to sink into from Pharmakon, Theologian, Martin Bladh and Sektor 304, Murderous Vision, Sutekh Hexen, Trepaneringsritualen and others, as well as a new fanzine called Forever Doomed from Tenebrous Kate that further explores her interests in occult metal and vintage black magic cinema.

As always, that's just the beginning. There's much more mutant heavy music and misanthropic art to be found on our shelves and in our bins...keep reading below to check out all of the strange and extreme new music, film, and art that's included in this week's new arrivals list.